Abstract

The effectualness of post-Newtonian wave forms and recently proposed P-approximants in extracting gravitational waves from inspiralling binaries of supermassive black holes is explored. Based on the extent of the overlaps of these approximate wave forms with the exact ones, we conclude that P-approximants are essential to reliably measure the parameters of supermassive binaries. The wave form from such a source depends on several parameters: The masses of the component bodies, their spins, eccentricity of the orbit, angles describing the orientation of the binary relative to the LISA detector, direction to the source, etc. Making a choice of search templates in such a multi-dimensional parameter space could be pretty complicated. We suggest a method based on the principal component analysis which could potentially simplify the search to a great extent by enabling us to choose templates in a parameter space of much smaller dimension than the physical parameter space.